Top 100 Albums of the 1990s

As the first band to leave the Dischord nest for the proverbial "bigger, better things," Jawbox broke a few DIY hearts when they signed to Atlantic. Subsequent dismissal would later fragment the band, but not before they laid down their magnum opus, For Your Own Special Sweetheart. Simultaneously violent and sublime as J. Robbins' gravelly rasp flies over the crunching chords of "Savory", or the drunken lurch of a wayward bassline collides with a tower of guitar at seventy miles per on the ominous "Motorist", all the gears turn in unison, creating a near perfect blend of heavy, uncompromising rock and an overarching sense of melody. The balancing act is flawless; Jawbox started in Fugazi's shadow as all Dischord bands inevitably do, but for a moment, superceded them, managing a feat that their ancestors wouldn't duplicate for several albums. --Eric Carr

069: Jeff Buckley Grace [Columbia; 1994]

It's difficult to imagine the world of contemporary singer/songwriters without the influence of Jeff Buckley. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine Radiohead in their current guise without the eerily affecting songcraft of Grace and its argument that modern rock needn't be just another run-through of post-Nirvana dynamics. Buckley's voice-- if not as recklessly expressive as his father's, certainly as overtly seductive-- soars angelically over his own chiming guitar figures. Gary Lucas (ex-Captain Beefheart) provides additional guitar and co-writes two of the best songs: "Mojo Pin"-- an epic transfiguration of Debussy with the heavenly grandeur of Led Zeppelin-- and the title track, which is at once perfect pop and an otherworldly declaration of freedom from the constraints of the material world.

Even as Buckley's vision seems incapable of disguising itself, his reinterpretations of Nina Simone's "Lilac Wine", Benjamin Britten's "Corpus Christi Carol", and especially Leonard Cohen's deeply affirming "Hallelujah" seem definitive. Grace ends enigmatically yet perfectly with "Dream Brother", as good an epitaph as any for an artist having clearly unfinished business in this world. It would have been nice to see where Buckley's promise would have led, but Grace will continue to spur on the midnight romantics for as long as it's within earshot. --Dominique Leone

068: Elliott Smith XO [Dreamworks; 1998]

A singer/songwriter with a major label recording budget is, as they say, kind of like a mule with a spinning wheel-- no one knows how he got it, and damned if he knows how to use it. But rather than obfuscating his songwriting gift with syrupy string sections and armies of backup singers, Elliott Smith used his Dreamworks debut, XO, as an opportunity to further focus the emotional power of his previous releases. Melancholy and grandiosity may seem mutually exclusive, but on XO, they're combined to wonderful effect, each crystalline guitar line and majestic piano arpeggio adding momentum and depth to Smith's gorgeous and impassioned vocals.

Indeed, the most striking thing about XO may very well be the elegance and restraint Smith brings to his songs. Smith always managed to say a lot with a striking economy of sounds and words, and not a single note here seems forced or gratuitous. Though Smith was being preened for stardom at the time of its release, there's not a self-indulgent moment to be found on the record-- even its most elaborate parts seem infused with the unassuming spirit of Smith's own musical discovery. XO shows a man poised to take over the world, still content to find new and moving ways to sing about it. --Matt LeMay

067: Mouse on Mars Iaora Tahiti [Too Pure; 1995]

It's difficult to name the best Mouse on Mars album because Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma have such different goals for each. Over the course of their career, they've made atmospheric soundtracks, collaborated with vocalists, and dabbled in noise. No two records sound alike. But Iaora Tahiti is often cited as a favorite simply because it's so damn listenable. With its squishy, organic synths, swaths of space and dub references, Iaora Tahiti just feels good, especially the record's first half. Eventually, Mouse on Mars would head off in more abstract directions, but here, there's nothing deep or challenging about songs with names such as "Saturday Night Worldcup Fieber". The record's second half is filled with longer, more intense tracks that touch on techno and drum-n-bass while incorporating guitars and live drums (some people called this post-rock, see), but Iaora Tahiti never strays too far from pop. This is sunny electronic music operating in accordance with the pleasure principle. --Mark Richardson

066: Tricky Maxinquaye [Island; 1995]

The influences peel off like stickers on a notebook. Utilizing Bomb Squad-confrontational production and subtly primitive IDM textures, Tricky's uniquely muddy form of soundclash shocked the mid-90s listening populace with his merger of angular, raw sampling, dark synth innovation, and pseudo-intellectual lyrics to build the convention-destroying music of Maxinquaye. A collaborative effort from a former husband/wife team, Adrian Thawes and singer Martina Topley-Bird, demonstrated a bizarrely genuine chemistry in such shielded music. Topley-Bird's distinctively British dialect developed a refreshing retreat from her more typical peers, yielding a more modern voice for a changing musical landscape. As she sings, Tricky's monstrously cracking vocals shadow hers to make the listening experience a more personal feat than many pieces before it.

Borrowing more than lyrics from his previous tenure guesting for Massive Attack, Tricky's producer/singer relationship is stronger than the interplay in more linear genres, making this an obsessive work of customization. Unforgettable moments appear frequently, from the gorgeously hard drum break of "Ponderosa" to the clicking future saloon shootout screamer of "Strugglin'" to the Michael Jackson-sampling "Brand New, You're Retro". It's hard to imagine the landscapes of modern electronica and underground hip-hop without this record's influence. --Rollie Pemberton

065: Daft Punk Homework [Virgin; 1997]

This is the kind of homework kids used to get in Paris, way back in 1997: French disco-breaks, dance-funk, and baguettes (a dietary staple from the "pretentious" food group). The latter is part of a balanced breakfast; the former two would be combined by Daft Punk to create the instantly accessible, so-simple-they're-unstoppable electro-fusion beats of Homework, the surprise success of which single-handedly brought French progressive house to worldwide prominence. Dmitri from Paris didn't show his work, and Air were just looking off Daft Punk's paper anyway; "Da Funk" is the original, with a sleazy, distorted vibe that sounds like 1970 imagining music in 1997, and still absolutely slays on the floor. Homework is a testament to elegance through simplicity, brilliant in its form. But Daft Punk never let that distract the listener; they would rather you just kept right on dancing. --Eric Carr

064: The Breeders Last Splash [4AD; 1993]

Like many records of the early 90s, Last Splash was a casualty of the alternative rock boom-- a wildly experimental album with a highly accessible standout single (in this case, two: "Cannonball" and the facetiously straightforward "Divine Hammer") that sent throngs of teenagers scrambling to buy it as quickly as to sell it back, and ten years later, it still has yet to fully overcome its reputation as a bargain-bin staple. This album, of course, was clearly never intended for mainstream consumption: its jarring blasts of feedback and screeching noise, angular vocal melodies, instrumental jam sessions, and unusual wordplay even seemed alien to some Pixies fans. Yet anyone open-minded to experimentation and the advancement of the form reveled in its brilliant, boundary-breaking melodies.

Kim and Kelley Deal beamed with girlish charisma and sibling chemistry, carefully crafting an album whose diversity was outweighed only by its artistry. "Invisible Man" is an aching pop ballad overdriven with distortion and longing; "No Aloha" opens with a disorienting vocal line and punchdrunk Hawaiian guitar before being swallowed by a vortex of chugging, blissful guitar pop; "Do You Love Me Now" is a searching love song that swoons like lovestruck 60s girl groups; "Saints" looks forward to summer with Jim MacPherson's skipping drumbeat and the Deal sisters' anthemic one-line chorus. Last Splash proved Kim Deal had more to do with the Pixies success than anyone had previously thought, and was so tight even its B-sides are classic. --Ryan Schreiber

063: De La Soul De La Soul Is Dead [Tommy Boy; 1991]

From the beginning, they knew their style of speak wouldn't be wholly accepted. Developed as an affront to the success of their debut album Three Feet High and Rising, De La squashed the D.A.I.S.Y theory, while tilting their sound toward denser and more introspective ends. The new incarnation of De La lampooned thug rappers, hip house, demo-toting hopefuls and Burger King employees, while tempering their more light-hearted humor with darker territory like child rape and crack addiction. Not only did the group manage to master the art of the skit and invent myriad off-kilter rhyme schemes; they also contributed the first notable concept album to hip-hop, basing this record around the meta subtext of a listening session with a discarded copy of itself.

Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II has few identifiable beats, choruses, or hooks. It doesn't even have song titles. Often, there's nothing but timbre. If you're lucky, a track might contain faint, arrhythmic squeaks. At its most approachable, it's a pop song attenuated to a classical structure and stripped of its purpose. It's music the same way the Bible is some book. Reportedly written in Richard D. James' lucid dreams, the pieces are lighter and more natural than death, necromantic vocals occasionally emerging out of tangible textures only to instantly recede.

On a couple of tracks, James audaciously manages to transform ambient Stockhausen/Reich-inspired phantasms into something a deaf man might almost call funky. On the more "disturbing" tracks, the incontestably sonorous-- perhaps even religious-- melodies seem to elliptically elude themselves and quietly uproot peals of static and a bitter spirit of languor. It simultaneously pledges to fulfill every desire and expose us all to fates terminated in Arctic graveyards. As an aftershock, it also spurred on one of the great trajectories of pop music in the 1990s, influencing everyone from Radiohead to Timbaland. Cloistered cubicle-dwellers and yoga instructors everywhere gobbled up every Aphex mouse pad and called him the messiah. Mojo called him the next Mozart, and in The Ambient Century, Mark Prendegrast compared one of his songs to Chopin. These are probably overreactions; then again, after buying this album, I've rarely had an inclination to listen to anything else. --Alex Linhardt

061: Pulp Different Class [Island; 1995]

In the UK, an oft-asked question throughout the summer of 1995 was "Blur or Oasis?" The correct answer was "Pulp." Months before the Blur-Oasis duel-- and about 15 years into their career-- Pulp reached #2 on the singles chart with "Common People", a rare moment of inspired anger and vitriol amidst the empty nationalism of Britpop. The song's bitter claim that "You'll never fail like common people/ And watch your life slide out of view" could have been aimed at Damon Albarn and his embrace of lower-class culture, the new anti-intellectualism of laddist slumming, or the conservatism of then-burgeoning Noel-rock. It was probably a bit of all three, simply disguising itself as the story of a brief fling between some anonymous low-rent bloke and the heiress to a family fortune.

Pulp's Jarvis Cocker wrote the bulk of Different Class after the success of "Common People", and it oozes with the confidence, ambition, and relief of a man who, after years of trying, was finally in the right place at the right time. He had to get it right and, spectacularly, he did, articulating the rage of the misshapen and the chronicling the dreams and small victories of broken people with a sparkling and biting blend of wit, panache, class warfare, sexual politics, and glorious (and "Gloria"-borrowed) pop hooks. In the process, Sheffield: Sex City's uncommon heroes proved themselves worthy of the record's titular compliment, and managed to avoid treading the same bloated, conservative waters in which their contemporaries eventually drowned, becoming Britpop's most transcendent stars and one of the UK's most engaging pop acts. --Scott Plagenhoef